you are right, Make an escort (like my fleet escort) a tank like your cruisers and I am all in, we give up walls for arrows, go to PvP and attack a KDF cruiser with an escort, see how even they are on the defense thing...lol

How many more times are you going to say give up walls for arrows? Saying it more times doesn't give it any more meaning than it had the first time.

It's a truism. You're acting like it's a fact that's being denied, when it's an INTENTIONAL DESIGN DECISION. It's not a bug to be fixed, it's on purpose. "Fixing" it would be deliberately imbalancing the game to make Cruisers better for all purposes than Escorts. What you should be asking for, instead, is for Escorts that are maximized for durability to be less durable, or Cruisers that are maximized for durability to be more durable.

Asking for Cruisers to do more damage is akin to asking that rock beat both paper and scissors, with no other changes to either paper or scissors. It doesn't matter what happened on screen, this is a GAME. It absolutely must have different design goals than a TV series, or it will completely fail as a game.

I have no doubt that was the plan (if rather bluntly put).

Two points for your consideration:

1) Image if you will there was a ship that didn't need a tank. Escort have 80% of a cruisers hull and shields. Ok, but the inverse isn't true. There are not so uncommon escort builds out there that can get by with 5% of that hull. Why?

Nothing survives long enough to be debuffed or in need of tanking. A escort can very readily be a Finger of God. There is little point to have much else, because with a escort nothing survives long enough to need anything else.

Image this ship can have a innate defense so high it doesn't need any other defensive abilities.

Say hello to your average escort.

2) Image if you will that your average escort player or borg elite can do so much damage that even with 80% shield resistance and 80% hull resistance, you don't live longer then 60 seconds, and/or don't do 10% of the damage of your average escort.

Say hello to your average cruiser or science ship.

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There is a sliding scale that in a battle with each side having <x> time to live and need <y> time to kill, disable, or flee their opponent.

I think the biggest point everyone arguing doesn't see (or refuses to acknowledge) is that we all have more than one ship slot. Even the F2P'ers. If you think escorts are better than cruisers in STFs, while cruisers and science ships are better suited for solo missions, then by all means equip both and swap them out as needed. Problem solved.

Unlike other MMOGs, you are not tied to a particular ship type for the rest of your character's life. Although particular character types go well with some ship types (Tac in Escort Vs. Engie/Sci in Cruiser/Science), it doesn't influence the outcome as much as equipment and BOffs/DOffs do.

I have a Starfleet Engineer in a Breen ship. A Starfleet tactical in a escort. A starfleet Science in a Vesta with all the Vesta bundle pack consoles. No slow turn rate cruiser yet and don't know when I will get one because when I first started playing the game my first ever character a Engineer I chose a Galaxy as a free ship and after that experience I can say that a slow turn rate cruiser was no fun compared to any science ship or escort.

Starfleet cruisers need to have improved turn rate. Some new fun and useful Engineering bridge officer abilities so that cruisers are fun to fly and better would be another welcomed thing. I hate being in Elite missions that have multiple Starfleet cruisers in them because they take so much longer to complete then when their are more escorts or science ships in them.

Starfleet cruisers are the most boring and time consuming ship to use in the game.

I think the biggest point everyone arguing doesn't see (or refuses to acknowledge) is that we all have more than one ship slot. Even the F2P'ers. If you think escorts are better than cruisers in STFs, while cruisers and science ships are better suited for solo missions, then by all means equip both and swap them out as needed. Problem solved.

Unlike other MMOGs, you are not tied to a particular ship type for the rest of your character's life. Although particular character types go well with some ship types (Tac in Escort Vs. Engie/Sci in Cruiser/Science), it doesn't influence the outcome as much as equipment and BOffs/DOffs do.

If your doing anything other than PvP and your not in an escort or escort like ship you are spending more time to do the content.

In a game that currently revolves around grinding out ten forms of currency why would you subject yourself to that. Ever?

Do people even know there's an ability called "Auxiliary to Dampeners"?
Cruisers love it.

I will agree there should be more competetive engineering boff abilities, tho, instead of the just 3 or 4 abilities that are used at the moment.
Very nearly all Tac abilities are great at their thing, and Science has a mass of good abilities.

The problem with Cruisers aren't beam arrays - it's not the turn rate - no matter how much people whine:
It's the inferior Engineering BOff abilities that Cruisers get swamped with.

On screen, escorts like the Defiant seemed to have combat capabilities similar to a retrofitted Excelsior or an Intrepid class ship and certainly had less offensive power and defensive shielding than a Galaxy class ship. Similarly, there is no reason to believe that a Prometheus class ship would not have energy shielding equal to or superior to an Intrepid class ship. It was a slightly newer design and presumably was larger in size and had a much larger warp core (three warp cores actually).

But the reality is some concessions have to be made for gameplay's sake. If you wanted to stick to canon, everyone would end up flying a Prometheus, Soverign, Nebula, Galaxy, or one of the 25th century replacements for them (Vesta and Odyssey) because ships were, in canon, far superior to any others in firepower. I think Cryptic did a pretty good job figuring out how to balance the ship classes. The problem is, escorts have slowly become more and more over-powered compared to other classes. The other problem is in order to sell new ships, they have slowly crept up the power of them, so older purchases (like the Galaxy) are completely outclassed.

The best thing to do at this point is buff cruisers and science ships. Cruisers could be buffed by making inertia more meaningful. When a Galaxy gets a Defiant in its tractor beam, it should not be so easy to escape. Cruisers should get slightly better shields too.

Science, on the other hand, is a completely different story. The biggest problem with science ships is that science powers are broken. If a fully buffed energy drain or Tyken's rift could take away 50% or more of a cruisers power. . . If a fully buffed feedback pulse absorbed energy for five seconds and then returned 95% of it with 99% accuracy, science ships could hold their own against escorts by either draining their power or dealing it back to them.

Unfortunately, I think because most players are too impatient to learn how to use science skills, a lot of complaining has led to science power nerfing.

Traditionally a escort was never meant to be a stand alone ship or take on anything bigger then it outside a wolf-pack.

es?cort (esk?rt) - n.
1.
a. One or more persons accompanying another to guide, protect, or show honor.
b. A man who is the companion of a woman, especially on a social occasion.
c. A person, often a prostitute, who is hired to spend time with another as a companion.
2.
a. One or more vehicles accompanying another vehicle to guide, protect, or honor its passengers.
b. One or more warships or planes used to defend or protect other craft from enemy attack.
3. The state of being accompanied by a person or protective guard.

Edit: In STO, unless I'm mistaken, they've taken on the job of cruisers, destroyers, battleships, and sometime carriers all rolled into one.

The escort crowd would still have the highest DPS in the game. The Cruiser and Science crowds would be able to sustain a lower, but constant, DPS without their weapons endlessly choking themselves on power.

In the current system, any weapon with a lower DPS than a Dual Cannon gets penalized twice for having a better firing arc: once by having a lower DPS AND once by having the same power usage as the Dual Cannon. Firing enough beams at the same time turns a lower DPS into an absolutely pitiful DPS (even at max power).